Mike Farren

When your head is removed, you need to think fast,
about what you’re going to think with; you can think
with your heart, your gut, your sex, your spleen…
I’ve heard people call the sphincter a second brain.
I would struggle to trust its judgement beyond
the most fundamental.
When I knew I needed
to spend a year with no head, I outsourced my thinking
to a start-up in some village I’d not heard of,
somewhere in the South Pennines. Their portfolio
of strategies for handling archetypal
scenarios was impressive – crowd-sourced from
multicultural networks of practical, creative
and mystical thinkers, capable of delivering
twists on bog-standard Abrahamic mythopoeia,
even going beyond common or garden western pagan,
while remaining staunchly incomprehensible
to plodding sequential logic.
I was sold.
Now,
I am thinking (which, I realise, is to say, they
are thinking for me) about leaving my head off
long-term. Let it concentrate on growing itself
a hipster beard, or whatever heads do, once they stop
having to be bothered with thought.

Mike Farren’s poems have appeared in journals and anthologies, including The Interpreter’s House, The High Window and Valley Press’s Anthology of Yorkshire Poetry. His debut pamphlet, ‘Pierrot and his mother’ was published by Templar Poetry. He publishes under the Ings Poetry imprint and hosts the Rhubarb open mic in Shipley.